Untitled Guerrilla Butterflies In Progress
Grand Avenue
New Haven
Feb. 12, 2025
While a NIMBY-stalled building plan leaves a stretch of Grand Avenue covered in blight, two grassroots artists picked up their brushes Wednesday to offer the neighborhood some temporary respite.
The two artists, Carla and Kevin, sketched and started filling flowing depictions of chains and butterflies with blue and yellowish-grey paint to create a mural on the side of a brick building across from Upon This Rock Ministries.
They recently finished a mural of flowers and green-leaf silhouettes on the building’s front (pictured above).
The building is one of three decrepit adjoining commercial buildings (including the former home of Unger’s Flooring) that were supposed to have been demolished by now. A New York developer bought them in 2022 with plans to replace them with 112 needed new apartments. Neighbors went to court to stall public approval of the plan, leaving the project (including the financing) in limbo. (Read about that here. Reached by phone Wednesday, the developer said he had no time to talk about the project’s status.)
In the meantime, graffiti tags have covered the street- and lot-facing walls of all three buildings, with one exception: a trippy eyeball-horeshead-vein?-branch? composition painted a while back by Carolina Falkholt (pictured above).
Carla and Kevin, who are a romantic as well as artistic couple, sketched out the plan for the butterflies-and-chains mural over breakfast. Kevin said he’s been painting similar murals on vacant blighted buildings in New Haven, Hartford and Bridgeport for years. Carla, who worked in smaller media, has enjoyed joining Kevin involved in the broader brick project. Their day jobs are in construction.
They have received only appreciation for their unofficial efforts, they said. (Still, given that they don’t receive advance permission, they asked not to have their last names published.)
“The inspiration” for the new mural “came from kind of breaking down the walls between neighborhoods and areas that are needing public beautification, where sometimes graffiti has overtaken and caused blight,” Kevin said. “We’re trying to break the chain by doing these murals and make it more comfortable for people to have community pride.”
Carla said she likes the transitory aspect of enlivening a wall destined for demolition at an unknown date while “bringing beauty” to neighbors in the meantime: “I think that’s the best part about it. Nothing is meant to stay forever as it is. Just to bring some beauty to the community.”
If you have a vacant wall needing an upgrade, let me know, and I can put you in touch with Carla and Kevin. Once they’re doing bringing temporary hope and vision to a Grand impasse.
